Abstract

The work analyzes the productive districts in Sicily, which is a lagging region in terms of development, and it suggests several proposals to make the working of these districts more effective for the competitiveness and the development of the regional economy. The analysis points out the need for a region like Sicily, which is particular-ly weak in the manufacturing sector, to improve its human capital and to trasform this human capital into social capital, and, at the same time, to enrich its en-dowments of material and institutional infrastructures, because all these elements are essential factors for the competitiveness of the districts and their firms. Furthermore, in this essay we put forward the proposition that the Institutions and the State should contribute to create, also through the adoption of the principle of subsidiarity (Quadrio Curzio, 2002), which regulates the interplay between institutions, society, the growth in Sicily, which is a region that spends a great amount of public money, without an adequate return in terms of growth of income and employment.

Storper M., Harrison B. (1991); “Flexibility, hierarchy and regional development: the changing structures of production systems and their forms of governance in the 1990s”, Research Policy, 407-422, 20 (5).